Dentists agree that a tooth often begins a downward spiral after being touched by a dental drill for the first time. Patients and practitioners alike have agonized over the decision to grind on healthy teeth. We, as practitioners, see conventional crown and bridgework fail prematurely. Several studies on crowns and bridges found an average 9-10 year life expectancy in the United States. Until about 1985 our choices for tooth replacement were poor, at best. Since implants have become the "standard of care" for tooth replacement our choices have improved dramatically.

1) Dental implants strengthen the dentition (entire set of teeth). By adding a dental implant where a tooth is missing, we are replacing the root and the crown (top) which is missing, thereby potentially increasing the life expectancy of surrounding teeth. In some ways the implant is more solid than the tooth it is replacing. Bridges and partials weaken the dentition by forcing other teeth to carry the burden of the missing ones.

2) Dental implants preserve the bone levels that are present when a tooth is lost. Without the implant the bone will slowly resorb (melt away) because there is no stimulus to keep it in place.

3) Dental implants do not decay. By far, the most common reason for a crown or a bridge to fail is because decay starts at the margin where the crown meets the natural tooth. Titanium implants cannot decay.

Below we contrast implant dentistry with more traditional forms of dentistry:

Many of these people have avoided going to the dentist because they are afraid of what the dentist will think, or afraid of what will happen to them once they get there. Let me make four things very clear.

2. Your fear of the pain is WAY out of proportion to the actual pain you will feel when we work on you. Do you remember how big your dad and mom looked to you when you were a child? When you finally grew up, they didn't look so big anymore. Your memory of the pain involved in seeing a dentist is like that too. Once you actually see it with grown up eyes, it doesn't look so big and bad anymore. Many of our very best regular patients started out just like you. They sometimes come in just to say hi even when they don't have a problem because the staff is friendly, and the atmosphere makes them feel comfortable.

3. Full dentures are a last resort! If you are used to having even diseased or ugly teeth, you cannot even imagine how disappointed you may be with full dentures. Dentures are, in fact, a sort of myth made of plastic! (Read on and you will see why.)

4. You do not naturally lose your teeth when you get old. This is a picture of a 73 year old man who simply brushed daily and used toothpicks to clean between his teeth all his life. He didn't eat much sugar except when he was very young (which accounts for the one visible filling you see on the upper left back tooth). With a little care, anyone can keep their teeth all their life!

2. As soon as the natural teeth are removed, the face begins to age rapidly. When new dentures are inserted for the first time, your facial appearance remains the same...at first .... But as soon as you walk out the door, the bone that held your original natural teeth begins the process of resorption (disappearing) which begins the process of collapsing your facial appearance.

Note: It is helpful to see the severe bone loss that can eventually happen after the teeth are extracted. Compare the panoramic x-ray of a normal mouth (seen on the x-ray page ) with that of a person who has been without teeth (edentulous) for a number of years (on the implant page) and notice the amount of bone that nature can remove if the teeth are extracted at an early age.

Dentures accelerate the aging process of your face because the distance between your nose and your chin begins to decrease as soon as the natural teeth are extracted. The bone that used to hold your top natural teeth begins to retreat up toward your nose, and the bone that held the lower natural teeth "goes south", allowing both the top and bottom false teeth to ride with them in the same directions. Within a few months, your face ages several years. As a result, the denture teeth eventually begin to disappear under your lips while the lips themselves begin to flatten out. This process continues for the rest of your life.

4. Dentures must be relined every two years. This means that new plastic must be added to the inside of your existing denture in order to fill spaces between the denture and the gums left vacant by the receding bone. Relines do NOT restore vertical dimension, but they do keep the denture tight and stable. If you fail to reline the denture the consequences are not good.

As the bone recedes and more and more space becomes vacant inside the denture, most people will begin wearing stiff denture adhesives to maintain the dentures in their mouths. They tend not to notice that the teeth move around more and more while chewing food. When a denture retains suction, but beings to move around over the bony ridge that supports it, we say the denture has good RETENTION, but lacks STABILITY. When the hard denture base is in close approximation to the bone that supports it, the denture has maximum stability, but as the distance increases, no matter what type of goo you put under it, the teeth become less and less stable and are much more easily dislodged by chewing food.

5. If you are a "gagger" (and have avoided seeing dentists to avoid gagging), you can be sure that the new denture will cause you to gag too. Probably the saddest group of people we see in this profession are those people who hate dentists because they tend to gag when anyone (including a dentist) puts something in their mouths. These people have it in the back of their mind that they can just wait until their teeth get so bad that a dentist will just put them to sleep, remove the teeth and they will wake up with false teeth and live happily ever after.

Actually, the first part of the dream can come true. It is expensive, but you can get your teeth pulled under general anesthesia and have an immediate denture inserted. It's the "happily ever after" that doesn't pan out. Gaggers tend to go toothless a lot because the presence of the denture in their mouths makes them feel like throwing up all the time. They avoid eating at other people's houses, and will wear their dentures only when absolutely necessary. The only hope these people have is if they can afford full mouth implants.